Courses

Marcela Fuentes    

MW 5:30-6:50pm 

Core: WEM 

English Major: Writing or Elective

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major: Upper-Division workshop

The fiction workshop will emphasize rigorous critique and discussion of literary fiction. We will read many published stories; however, the primary texts for this course will be your own manuscripts. The ultimate function of a workshop is not just to polish any given piece of writing, but to prepare you to articulate your own aesthetic visions. Understanding the relationship between that vision and the work that you do—and being able to shape the work with intentionality and insight. Students will learn to read like writers by examining narrative techniques and forms. They will have 2 opportunities to workshop during the semester: two workshops for new and original material. Additionally, students will keep an observation journal, provide formal weekly workshop critiques, attend a public reading.

Prerequisites: ENGL/WRIT/CRWT 10203 or ENGL/WRIT/CRWT 20103 or ENGL/WRIT/CRWT 20133. A fiction writing class for students with some experience in creative writing. Student cannot receive credit for CRWT 55153 and CRWT 30343.

Curt Rode

TR 12:30-2:00pm

Core: WEM 

English Major: Writing or Elective

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major: Upper-Division workshop

What is electronic literature? How do our assumptions about literature and creative writing shift when we study and produce literary texts that are “born digital”? This course will explore the composition of creative work using digital technologies – collage, graphic narratives, multimedia poetry/fiction, and creative short animations. The course emphasizes concepts in creative writing, multimedia, and authorship in digital environments. Students design and compose a variety of multimedia products incorporating typography, image, animation, and other modes. While a specific background in digital composing is not required, a sincere desire to play (and play some more) with digital composing tools is a big plus. You’re not going to break anything or kill anybody. Just get ready to play.

Prerequisites: ENGL/WRIT/CRWT 10203 or ENGL/WRIT/CRWT 20103 or ENGL/WRIT/CRWT 20133.

Matthew Pitt 

TR  11-12:20pm

Core: WEM

English Major: Writing or Elective

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major: Upper-Division workshop

As writers and as readers, we tend to craft or receive a short story as an immersive narrative world that stands alone, that is limited in scope, and that wraps forever once we reach their final words. But what happens when a work of short fiction spills over, bringing about a second story (or several)? This writing workshop will focus on story cycles—sequences of fictions that link to, converse with, and enhance one another. How do such stories manage to be both discrete and interrelated? We will pinpoint areas of focus that serve to braid and enrich the fictions: whether this involves shared locations, themes, narrators, historical periods, or other surprising strategies. As students study fiction cycles, they will also build their own, generating and submitting material, drafts, and revisions for workshop review as we forge forward, and hopefully, imagining further explorations to come, even after the term concludes. Published story cycles to be examined may include collections by Mia Alvar, Jennifer Egan, Denis Johnson, Randall Kenan, Ramona Reeves, and Joan Silber.

Required Prerequisite: Either CRWT 10203, CRWT 20103, or CRWT 20133 
Recommended Prerequisite: One prior, 3000-level Creative Writing Workshop 

Rohan Chetri

TR 3:30-4:50pm

Core: WEM

English Major: Writing or Elective  

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Writing

Creative Writing Major: Upper-Division Workshop 

“Katabasis” from the ancient Greek means a descent, a trip to the underworld in search of knowledge. A living  person descends to the land of the dead so that they may come back with knowledge that informs and instructs how to conduct life among the living. In this workshop, we'll be using this metaphor to turn inward in our own poetry. Through reading and discussion of various "katabatic" narratives from contemporary poetry and ancient epics, we will generate original poems involving our own lyric descent into the "underworld" as a way of imagining an encounter with the dead; and as a way of accessing the past, and re-calibrating the lens through linguistic and formal interrogations to allow for a radical re-visioning of the past. Each class will begin with discussions of readings for the week: excerpts from ancient epics such as the Akkadian poem “Descent of  Ishtar,” Aeneas’s descent in Aeneid, Odysseus’s descent to consult Tiresias in The Odyssey, etc. These will be paired with contemporary examples from world poetry, and variations on the theme by poets such as Tomas Tranströmer, Louise Gluck, Li-Young Lee among others. The reading and discussion of these texts will in turn help us generate high quality poems aligned with the theme of the course. The final project/portfolio (with a 3–5-page foreword essay) will consist of a group of poems written out of this symbolic “descent” and will in some form mirror this “katabasis” and a successful ascent ("anabasis") documented in poems. Course materials will primarily consist of handouts uploaded on D2L each week. Requirements include weekly readings, deep critical engagement while workshopping poems by peers, class participation and discussion of readings in class, writing assignments and typed workshop peer responses.

Prerequisites: ENGL/WRIT/CRWT 10203, ENGL/WRIT/CRWT 20103 or ENGL/WRIT/CRWT 20133. Prior to enrollment, students are also strongly encouraged to take ENGL/WRIT/CRWT 30353 (Poetry Writing Workshop I).

Alex Lemon

MWF 10:00-10:50am 

Core: WEM

English Major:  Writing or Elective

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major: Seminar

The Advanced-Multi Genre Workshop is a craft/workshop course in writing poems, short fiction, and creative non-fiction. This class is intended for students who are dedicated to creative writing, who have a strong background in CW and previous experience workshopping. In this course, you are expected to read, discuss, and lead discussion on literary texts in multiple genres and produce four assignments of original creative work in the genre/s of your choosing.

Prerequisites: CRWT 10203, or CRWT 20103, or CRWT 20133, plus the prior completion of a 30000-or 40000-level Creative Writing Workshop with a grade of at least B-. This class is repeatable for credit. Student cannot receive credit for CRWT 55703 and CRWT 40703.

A. Layne Craig

MWF 11-11:50am

Core: LT, HUM, WEM

English Major:  British Literature

Writing & Rhetoric Major:  Elective

Creative Writing Major: Upper-Division Literature and Language Elective

In this class, we’ll study the British artistic circle known as the Bloomsbury Group, made up of writers including T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, artists Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell, and cultural figures like economist J.M. Keynes. This group worked to remake British literature and culture along new, modern lines, and their influence continues to be felt today, particularly their boundary-pushing representations of sexuality and gender identity. We’ll examine literature in a variety of genres produced by Bloomsburyans, paying particular attention to the ways in which the history of sexuality in the early twentieth century both shaped and was shaped by these queer writers’ work. Grades in this class will be based on discussion board entries, exams, a multimedia project, and a research paper, as well as a participation grade. 

Prerequisites: ENGL 10803. ENGL 20803, and at least one 10000- or 20000-level ENGL/WRIT/CRWT course. 

Sharon Aronofsky Weltman

TR 2-3:200pm 

Core: HT or CA

English Major: British Literature

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major: Upper-Division Literature or Literature & Language 

What do you think of when you think of Oscar Wilde? The witty aphorisms? The hilarious plays? The Picture of Dorian Gray? Or appropriations of Dorian Gray in comics and films? Wilde the aesthete, perhaps holding a lily or a sunflower? The icon of gay identity? Or of oppression and martyrdom when he was sentenced to prison for two years with hard labor for making love to other men? Or his Irish identity? Wilde the literary theorist? Or the beginning modernism itself? This class will offer a survey of Wilde’s wonderful writing (plays, poems, fiction, and non-fiction) as well as others’ critical, biographical, theoretical, and creative work that help us ask how he defines the terms by which he is most often understood—identity and desire, body and text, performance and essence. But that is not all. The fin-de-siècle period of his rise and fall was a dynamic time of open possibilities and radical changes in ideas, art, and opportunities across genders and other categories. We will look at several writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and at more recent adaptations of their work—and Wilde’s—to contextualize them. We will examine plays about Wilde and his characters, exploring what is at stake in our myths and interpretations of him and his contemporaries. We will pay special attention to the New Woman authors of the same period as Wilde who pushed boundaries to reconceptualize identity, gender, and sexuality and to promote social justice, freedoms, and opportunities. Our readings will include a lot of funny, poignant, thoughtful, and riveting work by Wilde as well as exciting writing by women such as Vernon Lee, Michael Field, and Amy Levy, and we’ll read the devastatingly brilliant play about Wilde, Moisés Kaufman’s 1997 Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. Requirements will include dedicated reading, robust discussion, in-class exercises, two papers, creative options, and class presentations. Theatre students are very welcome to join this class.

Prerequisites: ENGL 10803. ENGL 20803, and at least one 10000- or 20000-level ENGL/WRIT/CRWT course. 

Chantel L. Carlson

TR 9:30-10:50am 

Core: HUM, LT, WEM 

English Major: American Literature 

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing: Upper-Division Literature and Literature & Language 

“Each person has a literature inside them. But when people lose language, when they have to experiment with putting their thoughts together on the spot-that’s what I love most. That’s where character lives.” - Anna Deavere Smith 
Through selected readings of women playwrights in American Drama such as Lorraine Hansberry, Lillian Hellman, Paula Vogel, Katori Hall, and Lynn Nottage, we will explore ways in which these playwrights from the early 20th century to the present responded to and were influenced by changing gender representations over the century, as well as how their writing became a form of agency in response to these changes. We will discuss broader questions such as how these texts celebrated and/or critiqued specific aspects of American culture and identity, as well as how these playwrights addressed constructs such as power, oppression, and identity. Students should become familiar with the possibilities of the modern stage through readings of not only traditional plays, but also through the exploration of experimental playwrights as well. 

Prerequisites: ENGL 10803. ENGL 20803, and at least one 10000- or 20000-level ENGL/WRIT/CRWT course. 

Brandon Manning

MWF 1:00-1:50pm

CORE: CA, LT, WEM

English Major: American Literature, Global Literature 

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major: Upper-Division Literature and Language Elective

This course will survey African American literature from the peculiar institution of slavery to the present. We will move in chronological order as we think through themes, tropes, and aesthetic choices of writers during the Antebellum period, Harlem Renaissance, Jim Crow, Black Arts Movement, and this Post-Civil Rights contemporary moment. We will examine the role of race and racism as well as the vestiges of slavery as we situate literature as an imaginative process by which writers represent, respond, or create alternatives to living in a country that as W.E.B. Du Bois asserts situates blackness as a problem. We will look to seminal figures like Harriet Jacobs, Booker T. Washington, Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and contextualize these figures within their historical moment while thinking about literary and cultural reverberations of their work in the present. We will engage different genres and mediums as we seek the answer to questions such as: What is African American literature? To what extent is African American literature bound to social constructions of race and racism? How have representations of blackness evolved alongside (or outside) the country’s long (often glacial) march towards freedom and justice?

Prerequisites: ENGL 10803. ENGL 20803, and at least one 10000- or 20000-level ENGL/WRIT/CRWT course. 

Jill C. Havens

MWF 9-9:50am

Core Categories: none

English Major:  Global Literature, Early Literature & Culture

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major: Upper-Division Literature and Language Elective

"The Global Middle Ages thus focuses on interconnectivity--whether of an artistic, commercial, linguistic, technological, religious, scientific, agricultural, political, martial, or epidemiological kind. We see, in this way, that early globalism is not just a concept of space--how large geographic spaces and vectors can be seen as interrelated and interconnected--early globalism can also be viewed as a dynamic: the forces pushing toward the formation of larger scales of relationship." --Geraldine Heng "Literatures of the Global Middle Ages" In recent excavations on the island of Helgo in Sweden, once an early medieval hub of trading and manufacture, a variety of objects were discovered including a small bronze Buddha from northern India, a bronze ladle from Egypt, and a trove of Arabic coins. But how did these objects from the East come to be found in Sweden? At a time when travel and communication was limited, recent scholarship of the "medieval" period has revealed quite extensive and "larger scales of relationship" between Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Scholars, like Geraldine Heng, working in the fields of Medieval Studies explore what some now call the "Global Middle Ages" or "early globalism." In her quote above, Heng refers to "the interconnectivity" of this period "of peoples, cultures, and landscapes." And this "interconnectivity" is not just across "large geographic spaces," but it also includes "interrelated" languages, religious and political beliefs, and material cultures. To make sense of these interconnected and dynamic relationships, this course will focus on several themes that have global impacts during the medieval period: exploration, migration and trade; pilgrimage, crusade and conquest; and disease, pandemics and climate change. Along with our reflection on the use of terms like "global" and "medieval," the course will center on the fiction and non-fiction literature of this period--from the records of travel and exploration, political and religious experience, to accounts of natural events beyond human control. 

Prerequisites: ENGL 10803. ENGL 20803, and at least one 10000- or 20000-level ENGL/WRIT/CRWT course. 

Mona Narain

TR 9:30-10:50am

Core: HUM, CA

English Major: British Literature, Early Literature & Culture

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major: Upper-Division Literature and Language Elective 

Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen—some of these early modern women’s names are well known to us as writers while others not so much. The very notion of women writing for public consumption was considered scandalous before the early modern period in history. Male contemporaries called Aphra Behn a “punk” because she wrote plays that showed women in powerful positions making their own way in a patriarchal society. Eliza Haywood’s heroines created multiple personas to travel abroad or seduce lovers to bend gender rules. How can we forget Jane Austen’s heroine Eliza Bennet’s refusal to be part of the marriage market, shocking everyone as she turned down Mr. Collins’ proposal? Maria Edgeworth argued for female education and Lady Mary Montagu insisted that the English start inoculating their children, a practice she learnt in Turkey. These women writers were trailblazers. In this course we will read a variety of texts in different genres by early modern women writers to understand the “rise” of the woman writer and the literary history of women’s writing in this period. We will analyze how they created a space for themselves in the literary sphere, how they participated in contemporary debates about gender roles, the institution of marriage, the role of poetic inspiration, whether women should be educated and whether women should write at all for public consumption. Assignments for the course will include seminar style discussions, quizzes, student presentations and a longer final research project. Anticipated Course Texts (this selection could change a little): Behn, Aphra. The Rover; Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko; Cavendish, Margaret. The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World; Haywood, Eliza. Love in Excess; Smith Charlotte. Charlotte Smith: Major Poetical Works; Anonymous. (editor Lyndon J. Dominique) A Woman of Colour; Austen, Jane. (Editor, Claire Grogan). Northanger Abbey 

Prerequisites: ENGL 10803. ENGL 20803, and at least one 10000- or 20000-level ENGL/WRIT/CRWT course.

Jacqui Haynes

MWF 10:00 - 10:50am

Core: CA, LT, HUM

English Major: American Literature

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major: Upper-Division Literature and Language Elective

This course offers a comprehensive survey of Mexican American/Chicano/a culture, spanning from its origins in the mid-nineteenth century to contemporary works. With a focus on the rich literary traditions of Mexican American culture, we will explore various genres including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, music, art, drama, food discourse, and film, featuring influential authors such as Rudolfo Anaya, Sandra Cisneros, Josefina Velazquez de Leon, Helena María Viramontes, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, and Juan Felipe Herrera. The course will trace the development of Mexican American literature through key historical and social contexts, from its early emergence to the cultural resurgence of the mid-1960s and its continued expansion over the past six decades. Students will critically engage with these works, reflecting on how they both shape and are shaped by intercultural experiences. The course also emphasizes the aesthetic principles, linguistic theories, and critical responses to these texts, with the broader goal of enhancing students' skills in critical thinking, reading, writing, speaking, and research. Additionally, students will explore how these literary expressions reflect individual and collective values, encouraging a deeper understanding of Mexican American cultural contributions.

Prerequisites: ENGL 10803. ENGL 20803, and at least one 10000- or 20000-level ENGL/WRIT/CRWT course

Bonnie Blackwell

W 6:00 - 8:40pm

Core: None

English Major: Theory

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Rhetorics and Culture

Creative Writing Major: Upper-Division Literature and Language Elective

 This course teaches analytic approaches to film by introducing students to humanities-based film criticism. Consistent with the English department’s mission statement, to “engage students in both the production and critical understanding of a wide range of texts in English in keeping with our commitment to writing as a mode of humanistic inquiry, expression, and persuasion,” this course looks at films as texts to decode and explore cultural meaning, but also to draw applicable connections to print culture and literature. By engaging subjectivity through several disciplinary lenses--philosophy, Marxist and Freudian theory, feminist analysis, and studies in “race” and culture--this course challenges students to view, interpret, analyze, and critique films as part of the humanistic tradition. Film genres will include: Musical, Horror, Western, Documentary, Suspense/Thriller, Mystery, and Film Noir, and countries of origin will include the US, Britain, and Japan.

Prerequisites: ENGL 10803. ENGL 20803, and at least one 10000- or 20000-level ENGL/WRIT/CRWT course.

Anne Frey

TR 12:30-1:50pm

Core: HUM, WEM

English Major: Elective

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major: Upper-Division Literature and Language Elective

In Common Law jurisprudence, used in both Britain and the United States, judges rely on past precedent to guide decisions. This practice, called stare decicis or “let the decision stand,” in fact developed slowly over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We’ll be reading British and American legal theory and Romantic-era literary texts to consider how and why law and literature evoked—or countered—historical precedents to make claims for what law and government should be and do. In both nations, these debates respond to the period’s widespread social change: in Britain, power was passing from the aristocrats to a new middle class at home, and a new administrative class was exploring the limits of individual power as they conquered and ruled an Empire abroad. In the United States, abolitionists asked how to make a constitution that acknowledged slavery accord with a moral system that told them slavery was wrong. Revolutions in France and Haiti challenged both nations to think through the possibilities of political change. As we read authors such as Horace Walpole, Walter Scott, Charles Brockden Brown, John Thelwall, Phillis Wheatley, William Wordsworth, Hannah Crafts, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, we will examine how genres including the gothic, historical fiction, and post-epic poetry differently thematize how much weight the past should have on the present. Work for the class includes several short exercises, two papers, and two exams.

Prerequisites: ENGL 10803. ENGL 20803, and at least one 10000- or 20000-level ENGL/WRIT/CRWT course

Heejoo Park

TR 2:00 - 3:20pm

Core: None

English Major: Research Seminar, Global Literature

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major: Upper-Division Literature and Language Elective

 This course takes the question, “What is Asian Diasporic Literature?” at its point of departure. In our analyses of novels, memoirs, short stories, and poems, we will map the historical trajectories that give rise to diverse and dynamic cultural expressions by Asian diasporic writers whose genealogies extend from China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, India, and merge within the United States. By approaching the everchanging contours of Asian American and Asian diasporic literature as what critic Kandice Chuh calls a “subjectless” discourse, we will explore the relationship between art and politics; identity and relations of power; personal and collective trauma; sense of belonging and displacement. We will pay specific attention to how language(s) play a crucial role in how individuals and groups in the Asian diasporas navigate their identities. Course materials may include Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt (novel), E. J. Koh’s The Magical Language of Others (memoir), and Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How to Pronounce Knife (short stories) and will include relevant critical essays. Additionally, as an English major seminar, this class will help students identify and explain how the English major contributes to their future professional goals and prepare materials (resume, online portfolio, etc.) that explain this learning to a general audience. Course assessments will include two major projects: 1) a final research paper that critically examines one of the primary texts of your choice and 2) a professionally oriented project that will require you to connect your learning as an English major with your career goals. This course will extensively employ class discussion, group work, and a process-based approach to the major projects.

Prerequisites: English majors and minors only; students must have junior or senior standing and must have completed one 30000-level ENGL/WRIT/CRWT course. This course is not repeatable for credit. Students cannot receive credit for ENGL 55843 and ENGL 38033.

Theresa Gaul

MW 4:00 - 5:20pm

Core: WEM

English Major: American Literature, Early Literature & Culture

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major: Upper-Division Literature and Language Elective

 This course focuses on life writing in early America from the colonial period through approximately 1830. In addition to reading autobiographies and letters, we will also consider the influence of life writing on poetry and novels. Throughout the course we will examine how autobiographical writing represent the self in the context of the Enlightenment and romanticism, European imperial development of settler colonies in the Americas, the formation of the nation of the United States, and communications transformations that shaped manuscript and print cultures during this historical period. We will pay special attention to how members of marginalized and oppressed groups used life writing to advocate for social change. Because this is a Writing Emphasis course, you will take each of your papers through a revision process to help you improve as writers.

Prerequisites: ENGL 10803. ENGL 20803, and at least one 10000- or 20000-level ENGL/WRIT/CRWT course.

Ariane M. Balizet

TR  3:30 - 4:50pm

Core: HUM, WEM

English Major: British Literature, Early Lit. & Culture

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major: Upper-Division Literature and Language Elective

 This class focuses on the dynamics of romantic love, gender identities, and sexuality in literature of the English Renaissance. This course examines the political, cultural, and aesthetic contexts of love and sex that shaped representations of desire in some of the Renaissance’s most enduring works, including drama and poetry by Shakespeare and others. Starting from the assumption that gender is a historically-specific construction, we will explore the ways in which race, class, and early modern theories of the body shaped erotic experience, domestic life, and political order in the 16th and 17th centuries. We will also consider the afterlives of these narratives in 21st century art and culture. Readings may include John Lyly, Gallathea; Christopher Marlowe, Edward II; William Shakespeare, Othello; Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Maid’s Tragedy; and Toni Morrison and Rokia Traoré’s Desdemona. Regular attendance and active class participation required. Assignments include reading quizzes, short essays, presentations, and a final project.

Prerequisites: ENGL 10803. ENGL 20803, and at least one 10000- or 20000-level ENGL/WRIT/CRWT course.

Karen Steele

TR 11:00am - 12:20pm

Core: HUM, LT, WEM

English Major: Elective

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major: Upper-Division Literature and Language Elective

 Many of our most beloved memories from childhood circulate out of the cozy ritual of bedtime stories; if you are still a reader today, you likely formed your habits as a child reading many of the books that we will be studying this semester. We will be returning to some of these well-thumbed stories, but the course will also expose you to many new novels for middle grade and young adult readers that influentially shape children’s feelings, beliefs, and aptitudes as readers today. Examining twentieth- and twenty-first century Anglo-American fiction aimed at readers on the cusp of adolescence, we will be exploring how stories teach us about social norms, culture – both the familiar and strange – and our place in an ever-widening society. Although the books we will be examining are pitched at a youthful audience, the amount of reading, the level of discussion, and the analysis expected will reflect a senior-level English course.

Prerequisites: ENGL 10803. ENGL 20803, and at least one 10000- or 20000-level ENGL/WRIT/CRWT course.

Lisa Nikoldakis

T 3:30 - 6:10pm

Core: None

English Major: Writing

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major: Upper-Division Creative Writing

 This generative workshop will allow students to develop longer nonfiction projects on topics of their choosing. We will focus on structuring both individual pieces and book-length works, as well as confronting the common questions of writing nonfiction: What are our ethical boundaries when turning real people into characters? What is truth? Reality? How do we position our work in a genre with such elastic and blurry boundaries? In addition to the many philosophical questions raised by CNF, we will focus on technique as well—including (but not limited to) nailing down your chosen voice, writing page-turning dialogue, and the importance of scene development. This class will be deeply encouraging and supportive, and the aim is to help student translate and transform their memories into readable, relatable content. We will begin workshopping early in the term, so please begin thinking now about what you’d like to work on in this course. And we will always take a break near the midpoint of the class.

Prerequisites: CRWT 10203, CRWT 20103, or CRWT 20133. Student cannot receive credit for CRWT 55143 and ENGL 50233.

Mohammed Iddrisu

TR 9:30 - 10:50am

Core: CA, WEM

English Major: Theory

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Rhetorics and Culture

Creative Writing Major: Upper-Division Writing & Rhetoric Elective

 This course is designed to critically explore rhetorical traditions and cultural practices mainly across nonWestern cultures. We will engage with and examine different ways of knowing and being among different cultures, especially in the so-called Global South, and within Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities. The scholarship we will engage with will call you to bear witness and respond to, in the words of Ellen Cushman, “the obligation of challenging imperial legacies of knowledge and power that have continued to structure the relationships we can have to place/land, history, our bodies, and one another.” To do this, we will delve into decolonial rhetorics and practices, Indigenous ways of creating and circulating knowledge, and alternative ways of knowing, being, and languaging that resist and challenge Eurocentric colonial paradigms. The course will also address discourses on citizenship in transnational contexts. By engaging with these different rhetorical and cultural practices, we will explore what it means to belong in a “pluriversal” world and how rhetorical practices in particular cultures shape our understanding of languages, knowledges, justice, and citizenship. Readings may include writings by James Baldwin, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Shui-yin Sharon Yam, Ellen Cushman, Michael Bokor, Achille Mbembe among others. Course assignments may include case study analysis, critical response essays, literature review, and a final research paper.

Prerequisites: ENGL 10803, ENGL 20803, and at least one 10000- or 20000-level ENGL/WRIT/CRWT course. Student cannot receive credit for WRIT 55663 and WRIT 30243.

Chantel L. Carlson

T 3:30 - 4:50pm

Core: None

English Major: Elective

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major: Internship

 This Tuesday section of WRIT 30390 is a 1.5 credit-hour internship (INT) course intended for students with an interest in literary magazine publication and basic web design. Students in the course will work in every stage of the production of the semester’s print issue of eleven40seven, TCU’s undergraduate journal of the arts, and its web edition (www.1147.tcu.edu). Specifically, students will gain knowledge of and experience in (1) the history and purpose of the student literary magazine, (2) the selection, editing, and proofing of the semester’s submissions, (3) the journal’s print layout and the design of the issue’s web edition, and (4) the distribution and promotion of the completed issue. Students will also receive, as needed, practical software training. The course may be repeated for credit.

Prerequisites: ENGL 10803 or 10833, and 20803 or 20833.

Chantel L. Carlson

R 3:30 - 4:50pm

Core: None

English Major: Elective

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Elective

Creative Writing Major: Internship

This Thursday section of WRIT 30390 is a 1.5 credit-hour internship course (INT) intended for students with an interest in literary magazine publication and basic web design. Students in the course will work in every stage of the production of the semester’s special anniversary print issue of eleven40seven, TCU’s undergraduate journal of the arts, and its web edition (www.1147.tcu.edu). Specifically, students will gain knowledge of and experience in (1) the history and purpose of the student literary magazine, (2) the selection, editing, and proofing of the semester’s submissions, (3) the journal’s print layout and the design of the issue’s web edition, and (4) the distribution and promotion of the completed issue. Students will also receive, as needed, practical software training. The course may be repeated for credit.

Prerequisites: ENGL 10803 or 10833, and 20803 or 20833.

Mat Wenzel

 

TR 12:30 - 1:50pm

 

Core: CA, WEM

 

English Major: Theory

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Rhetorics & Culture

 

Creative Writing Major: Upper-Division Writing & Rhetoric Elective

 

In this course we will engage with queer rhetorical strategies through queer archives, art, and activism. We’ll begin with defining queerness through José Esteban Muñoz, E. Patrick Johnson, and Jack Halberstam as being “more than identitarian markers,” a way of “destabilizing fixed notions of identity” and the reliance on “nonnormative logics and organizations of communities.” We will explore disidentification with classical and heteronormative/homonormative rhetorics as we seek to create: (1) a more complete archive of queer experience, (2) queer arts and queerer arts, and (3) contributions to emerging and ongoing queer activism.

 

Prerequisites: ENGL 10803, 20803, and at least one 10000- or 20000-level ENGL/WRIT/CRWT course.

Alexandra Edwards

TR 11:00am - 12:20pm

Core: WEM

English Major: Writing

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Digital Rhetorics & Design

Creative Writing Major: Upper-Division Writing & Rhetoric Elective

 This course explores the complex relationship between new media, culture, and design, with particular emphasis on cinematic rhetoric. We will start with a series of questions: what do moving pictures do? How do they do it? How has digital technology changed what moving pictures do and what we can do with them? In this course, you will be both learning about and authoring a variety of multimedia texts relating to the moving image. Products for this class will not be the traditional, academic-oriented essays; instead, we will work with different media, and you will produce several different kinds of texts, as well as explore the multiple complex ways that moving images are made, experienced, and understood. We will be composing with rhetoric, especially cinematic rhetoric, in mind.While this is a writing class that satisfies the WEM core requirement, it is designed for students with a particular interest in writing, design, and working in digital environments.

Student cannot receive credit for WRIT 55263 and WRIT 40263.

Carrie Leverenz

Time: Arranged

Core: None

English Major: Elective

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Internship

Creative Writing Major: Internship

 Students with 60 credit hours and a Writing/English GPA of 3.0 or CUM GPA of 2.8 can receive workplace experience (and, depending on agency policy, sometimes a stipend) from companies or agencies in publishing, advertising, grant writing, web writing, or other fields. Duties are arranged to fit each student’s schedule, and work opportunities may include research gathering, editing, social media/web authoring, or document production. Students will produce a writing portfolio at the end of term. Students need to work a minimum of 8 hours a week during the semester to receive three hours of credit. This course may be repeated once for credit. NOTE: Students should plan to meet with the internship coordinator the semester before the one in which they’ll be enrolled in the course. Students are responsible for setting up their own internships. Some internships are competitive, and some require applications 6 weeks-6 months in advance. Each agency may have only 2 interns per semester. Internships for fall semester must be confirmed by the first Monday in August and internships for spring by the end of fall finals week. Interested students should read through internship procedures and agency contacts on the English department website. Further information available from the Internship Coordinator, Dr. Carrie Leverenz (Rm 121 Reed Hall)

Carrie Leverenz

MWF 11:00 - 11:50am

Core: None

English Major: Writing

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Writing & Publishing

Creative Writing Major: Upper-Division Writing & Rhetoric Elective

 Editing and Publishing introduces students to the practice of editing manuscripts intended for publication. Topics include the editorial process (both academic and commercial), the ethics of editing, and the role of the editor in publishing. We will explore issues in the contemporary publishing scene, including the use of AI in editing, and work on editing actual manuscripts for TCU Press or other publishers. By the end of the course, students will be ready for an editing internship or post-graduate editing and publishing program.

Prerequisites: ENGL 10803, ENGL 20803, and at least one 10000- or 20000-level ENGL/WRIT course. Student cannot receive credit for WRIT 55283 and WRIT 40283.

Shuv Raj Rana Bhat

MWF 1:00 - 1:50pm

Core: CA, CSV, WEM

English Major: Theory

Writing & Rhetoric Major: Rhetorics and Cultures

Creative Writing Major: Upper-Division Writing & Rhetoric Elective

 Language, Rhetoric and Culture explores the role of language in human communication and culture, with attention to the implications of language ideologies to various forms of communicative interaction. Language, rhetoric, and culture are three fundamental aspects of what it means to be human. Language, more than just words, is how we make our way in the world, how we understand the world. Rhetoric, as the art of persuasion, illuminates the how of communication: how are we affected by specific things and how do we in turn affect others? Culture depends on rhetoric and language to assert itself upon us, to create a world for us to inhabit. We will be examining this complex intersection through a variety of texts and artifacts interrogating and developing theories of their interplay. We will be reading and writing in a variety of modes: text, image, video, etc. from various perspectives: critical discourse analysis, rhetorical analysis, media-centered approach, visual rhetoric approach, a culture-centered approach, dramatistic/narrative approach etc.

Prerequisites: ENGL 10803, ENGL 20803, and at least one 10000- or 20000-level ENGL/WRIT course.